Social skills can be hard to master for anyone, and the unwritten rules that prescribe them in our fast-paced culture can be all too easy to miss for...

Home alone?

If you’re trying to determine your kid’s free-range or home-alone skills, check out these resources!

Child Care Aware has a short checklist for determining home-alone readiness at tinyurl.com/home-alone-mn. You’ll find questions like, “Does your child know when and how to call 911? Can your child say and dial your home phone number and provide your home address? Can your child name five household safety rules? Have you created a plan for your child’s time at home?”

The Children Youth and Family Consortium at the University of Minnesota has an extensive to-do list for parents preparing their kids to stay home alone. Your children should know what to do if they are accidentally locked out, get into arguments with siblings or need to respond to a stranger at the door. See tinyurl.com/home-alone-uofm.

"Today, the greatest “stranger danger” threat to our kids is that the stranger will call the cops to report them. My 10-year-old daughter was questioned by a police officer less than two blocks from our house after a woman pointed her out to him. Fortunately, the cop had more sense than the woman and CPS is not a part of our lives." — Emily Metcalfe, St. Paul

"Free-range parenting? It’s how we were raised in the ’70s. I lived outdoors all summer growing up, walking/biking to parks, stores, friends’ home. Most of my summers I was just with other kids. No cell phones, hardly any adult supervision while outdoors. I lived in the heart of St. Paul. How are kids going to learn to live on their own?" — Ellie McFadden Jacobson, Farmington

"Amen! I had the same wonderful experience in the ’90s in south Minneapolis. We were totally safe in numbers and played outside without adults all day. We were just a holler or a sprint away from someone’s house if we needed something, but had independence! It’s sad to see that go away for today’s kids." — Laura Mitchell, Minneapolis

"I think this is a hard one to be strictly on either side of. Yes, most of us had childhoods comprised of running loose, hanging in packs, going wherever the wind blew us. And do I want that for my kids? Yes. However, we also have all seen the stories of kids being taken, and I can’t help but to think when my eyes aren’t with my kids: What if this one time is ‘the time.’ The time something bad happens. I definitely think Jacob Wetterling changed a lot of things for people around here. He was our age and it happened just like that. And Elizabeth Smart was taken from her room. I don’t want to be a helicopter parent, but I also don’t want to be a devastated parent." — Holly Koenen, Chaska

Free-range kids?

Our children need more time outdoors. Letting them roam free, however, makes many of us a bit nervous. How can parents find balance?

By Jen Wittes

Jen Wittes is a marketing director, writer, certified postpartum doula and mom of two living in St. Paul.

We’ve all seen those Facebook posts and chain emails that recall a simpler childhood — free of cell phones and full of outdoor adventures with boundaries in the form of a neighbor’s corner lot and the end of play time determined by the street lamps flickering on at dusk.

We look back fondly on biking to school and epic games of tag, twisting through a dozen semi-familiar backyards.

But now, parents ourselves, we question the previous generation’s seemingly apathetic lack of concern for our safety, and we become our own generation’s inevitability — helicopter parents — overscheduled, over diagnosed, over concerned, overworked, over informed. Pinterest perfect, tightly wound, earnest and FUN, and worried sick.

Inspired by a subway ride

The pendulum, without fail, eventually swings the other way. A counter-movement has been building in recent years. It’s called free-range parenting.

Fueled at first by a desire for less screen time, parents were determined to get kids out of the house and to pass on the gifts of their own independent childhoods, lived autonomously and, almost entirely, outdoors.

Though Skenazy’s original goal was to help parents let go of delusional levels of fear, she (and parents like her) are now facing push-back for exercising their free-range parenting rights when bystanders, police and even Child Protective Services get involved:

• A brother and sister, ages 10 and 6, were spotted walking home from the playground in Maryland last December. Their parents were investigated for neglect. In April, police picked the kids up again on a walk home after a call from a concerned citizen. Instead of bringing the children home like they did the first time, police took them directly to Child Protective Services without the parents’ knowledge, leaving them worrying for hours.

• Chicago author Kim Brooks detailed her story with a piece on Salon.com last year: She left her 4-year-old son in the car playing with an iPad while she ran into a store for five minutes.

She avoided charges by doing 100 hours of community service and attending parenting education classes.

Skenazy — who argues that crime rates are at a 50-year low and that car accidents are far more dangerous for kids than roaming free — believes free-range parenting is a civil-rights issue for parents and children.

She’s become an advocate for parents who resent the so-called nanny state of nosy neighbors. Her book includes a card for kids to carry when they’re roaming free to set bystanders’ minds at ease. It reads: “I am not lost. I’m a free-range kid,” and includes parent contact information on the back, plus an explanation of the free-range philosophy.

Alison Feigh, the program director at the Jacob Wetterling Resource Center, a longtime friend of the Wetterling family and a former classmate of Jacob’s, said: “The Wetterling legacy is not to grab your kids tighter. It’s not fear-based. It’s about exploring safely.”

Feigh is quick to mention that Jacob’s story — forceful abduction by a stranger, while playing with a group of kids — is a statistical anomaly and that “the danger is more likely in the person you let through the front door, not the person your child meets out the back door.”

At first glance, it would seem that Feigh and Skenazy are on the same page. However, Feigh worries about the concept of free-range parenting as a blanket movement which encourages “all kids” to get out and explore in the same way.

Feigh also believes there’s a big difference between intentional free-range exploration as mutually agreed upon by parent and child versus need-based alone time dictated by a lack of child-care resources.

Does the child want this? Does the parent need this? What safety preparations have been made? What practice steps led up to the hour alone at the park? These things make a difference.

Fighting the fear

Most of us, as parents, feel confused about all of it — and very much caught in the middle. We don’t want to hover, but we do. We’re both scared of and impressed by Skenazy’s son’s subway trip. We’re inundated with horror stories and can’t help thinking, “What if? What if we’re the statistical oddity?”

We’re unsure of the law, our rights and our responsibilities.

In Minnesota, there’s no clearly defined law about kids being alone at home, at the playground or in cars.

Regulations vary from county to county, and they are, in many cases, subject to individual police officer or social worker interpretation, depending on the situation. (Check out the sidebar with this article for some recommendations, however.)

Neglect, as defined in Minnesota, means failure to provide “appropriate supervision” and protection from “conditions or actions that endanger the child.”

'Worst first' thinking

Most of us aren’t neglecting our kids. In fact, many parents sincerely worry about hindering their kids’ development, worried that, by over-worrying, we’re removing so much risk they’ll never be able to cope when we finally do set them free in the real world.

But, most of all, we fear we couldn’t live with the consequences if something unthinkable happened while our kids were in our care.

Why are we so darn afraid of the worst, most unlikely scenarios?

Skenazy believes, when it comes to parenting, we’re an “overreaction nation.”

“We are overestimating danger and underestimating kids,” she said. “It’s a ‘worst first’ kind of thinking, where our minds jump to the craziest news story we’ve ever heard and thus the worst-case scenario.”

Skenazy blames media saturation for this phenomenon.

“It’s like advertising. Repetition penetrates our thought process,” she said. “Your brain works like Google in this way. These horrific, yet rare, stories of random acts against children make the news headlines and the feeds and the talk shows and then — as we evaluate reasonable risk as a parent — those are the first things that come up on our internal search engine.”

Adding to the sensationalist media onslaught is our modern turn toward a litigious society — everything’s seen through the eyes of risk. We’re also a culture of experts: There’s a blog on that, an app for that and a how-to manual.

“In terms of parenting, that translates to a sort of thinking that every decision we make can either boost our kid to Harvard or ruin them forever,” Skenazy said.

Building community

In the meantime, if you’re struggling with the balance between safety and independence, both tempted by and frightened by the idea of free-range parenting, building your sense of community might be a good place to start.

Get to know your neighbors. Talk about it. Take turns supervising the park.

Skenazy encourages us to “flood the streets with kids, as there’s strength in numbers.”

With technology increasing our tendency to disconnect, it sometimes feels like we’re in each other’s business, but not in each other’s lives.

Though Minnesota doesn’t have a home-alone age law or a law restricting leaving children alone in automobiles, the general recommendation is that children shouldn’t be left home alone until age 8.

Parents who leave children age 7 and younger home alone may be subject to maltreatment evaluations. Factors such as the child’s ability, risks present, duration of time left alone and the reason for time left alone would be considered. Learn more about Minnesota’s child neglect laws at mn.gov/dhs.

Each county develop its own rules and policies. One county with clear, widely published guidelines is Dakota County, where child-supervision problems will be investigated if there are reports of:

• Children age 7 and younger left alone for any period of time

•Ages 8-9 alone for more than two hours

•Ages 10-13 alone for more than 12 hours

•Age 14-17 left unsupervised while parents are absent for more than 24 hours.

•In Dakota County, it’s acceptable for children age 11-14 to babysit with the expectation that the parent, guardian or caretaker will be returning to supervise the children later that same day. It’s acceptable for ages 15 and older to babysit younger children for more than 24 hours.

Jen Wittes, a frequent contributor to Minnesota Parent, lives in St. Paul.